How do I add a submodule to a sub-directory

Question

I have a git repo in    janus  with a bunch of submodules in it  I want to add a submodule in    janus snipmate-snippets snippets   but when I run git submodule add  lt git github com     gt  in the snipmate-snippets directory  I get the following error message   You need to run this command from the toplevel of the working tree    So the question is  How do I add a submodule to the snipmate-snippets directory

User · Answer

I had a similar issue  but had painted myself into a corner with GUI tools   I had a subproject with a few files in it that I had so far just copied around instead of checking into their own git repo  I created a repo in the subfolder  was able to commit  push  etc just fine  But in the parent repo the subfolder wasn t treated as a submodule  and its files were still being tracked by the parent repo - no good   To get out of this mess I had to tell Git to stop tracking the subfolder  without deleting the files    proj gt  git rm -r --cached   ui jslib   Then I had to tell it there was a submodule there  which you can t do if anything there is currently being tracked by git    proj gt  git submodule add   ui jslib   Update  The ideal way to handle this involves a couple more steps  Ideally  the existing repo is moved out to its own directory  free of any parent git modules  committed and pushed  and then added as a submodule like   proj gt  git submodule add git bitbucket org user jslib git ui jslib   That will clone the git repo in as a submodule - which involves the standard cloning steps  but also several other more obscure config steps that git takes on your behalf to get that submodule to work  The most important difference is that it places a simple  git file there  instead of a  git directory  which contains a path reference to where the real git dir lives - generally at parent project root  git modules jslib   If you don t do things this way they ll work fine for you  but as soon as you commit and push the parent  and another dev goes to pull that parent  you just made their life a lot harder  It will be very difficult for them to replicate the structure you have on your machine so long as you have a full  git dir in a subfolder of a dir that contains its own  git dir   So  move  push  git add submodule  is the cleanest option

User · Answer

You go into    janus and run   git submodule add  lt git github     gt  snipmate-snippets snippets    If you need more information about submodules  or git in general  ProGit is pretty useful

User · Answer

one-liner bash script to help facility Chris s answer above  as I had painted myself in a corner as well using Vundle updates to my  vim scripts   DEST is the path to the directory containing your submodules   Do this after doing git rm -r  DEST  DEST  path   for file in  ls   DEST    do git submodule add  grep url   DEST    file   git config awk -F    print  2      DEST    file   done   cheers

User · Answer

For those of you who share my weird fondness of manually editing config files  adding  or modifying  the following would also do the trick    git config  personal config    submodule  cookbooks apt       url   https   github com opscode-cookbooks apt    gitmodules  committed shared config    submodule  cookbooks apt       path   cookbooks apt     url   https   github com opscode-cookbooks apt   See this as well - difference between  gitmodules and specifying submodules in  git config

User · Answer

Note that starting git1 8 4  July 2013   you wouldn t have to go back to the root directory anymore    cd    janus snipmate-snippets  git submodule add  lt git github     gt  snippets    Bouke Versteegh comments that you don t have to use     as in snippets    snippets is enough   See commit 091a6eb0feed820a43663ca63dc2bc0bb247bbae      submodule  drop the top-level requirement      Use the new rev-parse --prefix option to process all paths given to the submodule command  dropping the requirement that it be run from the top-level of the repository       Since the interpretation of a relative submodule URL depends on whether or not  remote origin url  is configured  explicitly block relative URLs in  git submodule add  when not at the top level of the working tree       Signed-off-by  John Keeping    Depends on commit 12b9d32790b40bf3ea49134095619700191abf1f     This makes  git rev-parse  behave as if it were invoked from the specified subdirectory of a repository  with the difference that any file paths which it prints are prefixed with the full path from the top of the working tree       This is useful for shell scripts where we may want to cd to the top of the working tree but need to handle relative paths given by the user on the command line

[git] How do I add a submodule to a sub-directory?

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